Maria Buduchikh is a contemporary Russian artist. She usually works in stylish abstraction. Some of her paintings are an extraordinary combination of rustic, graphic, vintage and modern, while others are abstract living works.
In her latest collection, abstract fabric sculpture paintings, experiments in the works have reached a new level, opening not only for the audience, but also for themselves, extraordinary forms of embodiment of ideas. In addition, Buduchikh is a popularizer of contemporary art in Russia, and together with a group of art historians, recorded the course "How to understand (fall in love) with contemporary art?"
So, I want to be honest, when I started this account, it was my creative experiment. Or rather, when I started creating at all, it was a creative experiment.
At the age of 25, I tried to create my first painting for the first time.
Before that I considered myself not a creative person at all.
But since I was very much into spiritual development at that moment, creativity became something inevitable for me.
I started with the simplest of things - acrylic pouring and for me at that time it was something wow. My usual understanding that an artist is necessarily someone who stands at an easel for hours and draws something, began to disappear instantly.
At that point, I had no idea what art was. It seemed that if you did something in a certain format on canvas, it was necessarily art. But why? What are the criteria for it? Who sets those criteria? What defines art from non-art - I couldn't answer these questions, even after watching a dozen videos on YouTube and reading several books about the formation of contemporary art. It was always about the same thing - this artist did this, his work is unique with this. And the answers to the question of what contemporary art is - a pile of garbage or a bunch of empty plastic cans - did not suit me. All the definitions were so vague that it seemed that the speakers themselves had no idea what was going on at all, and in order not to fall in the mud, they were formulating the definition somehow.
In addition, I once had such an incident. I started leading master classes, but I didn't want to do like everyone else - group classes on small canvases and just show different techniques. I wanted to show the value of the whole creative process by creating an abstract work in a large size. I wanted to say to the world: if you know certain techniques, anyone can be a modern artist. I wanted to share what had inspired me not so long ago to learn a new creative profession.
And so, at one of my personal master-classes, a situation arose: a girl and her son came to me to create a large abstract work. They came on the recommendation of another of my students. When they first saw the work of this student of mine, they could not believe their eyes - that she created such a work in a couple of hours at my master class with her own hands.
And here you can imagine - my master class, we create a work, they are inspired, I am inspired - everything turns out in one breath, everyone is satisfied, happy, we get a great result. And when we are finished and it would seem that we should go away, confidently shaking hands with each other, she says: "Aaaaah... well, it's clear, it turned out cool, well, it's not art...".
Because I myself had no idea what art is and did not understand why one "ointment" is valued and the other - not, I was too shy to continue this dialog, so as not to devalue myself and my creativity even more. But that moment was a turning point for me. I stopped all master class activities, stopped my youtube and went into myself to finally figure out what I was about and what art was about. It was another challenge for me, which I think, years later, I successfully solved for myself.
So, after this situation at the master class, what conclusion can we draw?
As long as people don't know how it is done, it causes a wow effect and it can be called art. If the process is simple and moreover you know how it is created, it is not art.
You can also relate this to selling paintings - if people (buyers) don't know how it's made, it represents value. If people know how it's done and it looks simple, and the artist doesn't have a name - they won't buy it, or they'll buy it cheap. So we need to come up with a technique so that no one knows how it's done and it will be called art?
Let's separate this as a separate hypothesis, art is when you come up with something new in terms of technique, and no one knows how to replicate it, and therefore "it" is art.
Let's remember and analyze why it might have been relevant some 50-30 years ago. And it's not relevant now.
Publication in AD Magazine Russia
26.08.2020 Our paintings in AD Magazine Russia
